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Website content – mind your Peas and Queues

Writing website copy: it’s an essential part of the process of creating a website, but in some cases it’s a bit of an after-thought. Sometimes we – as a web design agency – even end up supplying suggested copy for sections of the site which have been overlooked, copy which ends up going into the production site because no-one seems concerned enough to review it.

But the copy on your website is important. It should be laboured over, drafted and re-drafted, and honed into a thing of perfection. But then I would say that, because I love words. But there’s evidence that not paying sufficient attention to the basics can end up hitting your bottom line, something that every business should take seriously. The BBC news website today carries a story about ‘online entreprenuer’ (what is he when he’s offline?) Charles Duncombe, who contends that a single error in the spelling or grammar used on a website can halve its revenue.

Photo credit: CookieDuster, Flickr

Mr Duncombe, who runs a number of e-commerce websites selling everything from mobile phones to clothes and travel, measured the performance of one of his sites before and after a simple spelling error was corrected. The results, he claims, are shocking – the revenue per customer doubled once the error was corrected. Mr Duncombe doesn’t share with us his methodology nor his exact figures, but the implications are obvious.

While older generations bemoaning the quality of written English in school and university leavers is seriously old news, the figures speak for themselves – and it makes perfect sense. Whether you’re selling online or communicating your core business competencies and values, how can you expect anyone to want to do business with you if you haven’t taken the time and trouble to write well structured, interesting and above all grammatically correct copy?

Note to the eagle-eyed and the pedantic – any spelling or grammatical errors in this post are entirely intentional, and were included for the sake of irony. Any errors in the remainder of the website can be notified here.